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I'm a lone game dev, aspiring to do this professionally. I do game design, programming, and 2d art. I don't do sound/music. Up until now I've mostly used free 3d models for my 3d projects. I'm developing using Unity.

How much work does it take to create 3d-models? Depends on the level of detail I guess, so here is an example of the detail I'm thinking of. Workload is also relative. What I'm afraid of is that I'll spend 50% of the time on designing the game and implementing the game logic, and the rest of the time creating 3d-models... That would be totally unacceptable. Efficient development is very important to me, and "wasting" too much time creating 3d-models that a professional modeler could do much better in 1/5 the time would not be good.

How steep is the learning curve? How much work does it take to get to a "decent" level of proficiency using Blender? I'm not totally "art-illiterate" -- I have at least a past-beginner artistic eye.

My impression right now is that 3d-modeling is time-consuming work, requires years to reach decent proficiency, is best left to modeling specialists, and that I'm better off buying finished assets. However, if that's not the case, I'm definitely eager to learn.

You don't need to be an expert modeler to share -- if you've got any kind of experience in modeling I'd be glad to hear :-) I hope you can share some insights. Thanks!

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I am currently also a lone wolf using Unity, but I am a little ahead: I dived into also doing 3D modelling from the start.

Let me tell you, the amount of time you can waste on creating 3D Models really is INSANE! A fully modelled character with a detailled normal map, highpoly count, multiple LODs, rigging, animations, clothing and props can take an expierienced 3D Modeller many weeks to create... often, you will find modellers, texture artists, riggers, animators, and other specialists working together to get more efficient in big studios.

The example you picked is one of the more complex projects to tackle: quite detailled normalmaps needed, photorealistic (or almost so), so quite detailed textures needed, rigging needed for animations, and so on.

IF you start from scratch, expect some months just to learn the needed anatomy to sculpt a human body that does not look like shit, then you need to go through the troubles of retopology and baking to a lower poly mesh (which sometimes takes me longer than the sculpt itself as the bake might show artefacts at places because the lowpoly mesh is not good enough), then it will take you some time to find out how to texturize this model, and then comes the whole process of creating a skeleton, weightpainting, setting up the rig, before you can even start with the animations. Of course with expierience you will work faster, but for your first model, expect to waste a LOT of time.

Now, there are a lot of tools and tricks to work smart. Which might save you a lot of time.

- First trick is to always work from a base mesh. Most 3D Modelers seem to do that with humanoid or other organic creatures, as remodelling the human body everytime is a waste, especially when your character is more or less the average human with just some small deviations from the norm (broader chin, a scar here and there, whatever). You get base models with most sculpting software (ZBrush or 3D Coat for example), there are a lot of free ones, there is even a free tool (Makehuman) to tweak your character from which you can export a 3D Mesh as base mesh.

Then a lot of modellers will tell you to keep all you do, and re-use where you can. Need a Human arm for some gruesome horror scene? Take the one you created for you character rig last week!

- Use specialised tools for every task. You can do pretty much everything in Blender, or 3DS Max, or Maya. Boxmodelling, Sculpting, Texturing, Retopo, Rigging, Animation.... they do it all!

But, apart from Boxmodelling, for most tasks there are more specialised tools that are sometimes even quite lowcost, that will make that specific task easier.

Sculpting: Personally I use 3D Coat Voxmodelling for sculpting. It allows me to start sculpting without first doing a base boxmodel, and without needing to worry about the mesh topology, as the mesh is created automatically from an internal Voxel representation of the model.

ZBrush is the Industry standart tool for Sculpting. A loot of good 3D Modelers will tell you its the best tool for sculpting.

3D Coat has a Voxmodelling mode and a traditional Sculpting mode.

Both of these tools will at least beat Blender for various reasons when it comes to sculpting.

There are more tools, like Mudbox, out there.

Retopology: 3D Coat has a very powerful set of retopo tools. I cannot really compare it to the retopo tools in Blender, but from what I heard, the workflow is quite complicated. In 3D Coat, its made as easy as possible for you. Apart from the usual fight with getting all the high poly details unto the lowpoly mesh without artefacts, its quick and easy.

Texturing: both 3D Coat and ZBrush have different quite powerful tools for 3D Painting, allowing you to paint directly on the 3D view of the model. Then there are new tools like DDO or the Substance Designer /Substance Painter that give you different powerful tools to work directly with materials containing tiling textures for all the channels without you needing to create all the channels separate. Also, tools like Crazybump and XNormal can help you to calculate additional maps or tweak your existing maps.

Creating LODs: there are multiple (sadly quite expensive) tools in the asset store for Unity for LOD creation. I have not tried them out yet, but I will certainly give at least one of them a spin. If it works, it will save me many hours of my time, making the price a bargain. Also, there is now a webservice for LOD creation that has a free Unity plugin (of course you only get 2 Models LODs created for free, after that you need a subscription)... cannot remember the name though.

Rigging and Animation: Here Mixamo comes to mind. Its an online service that gives you various tools for rigging and lets you purchase single animations you can then transfer to your models. The tools are pretty straightforward and they do work, which itself is a miracle, but of course its not without its limitations (tried it once with my first humanoid sculpt, it worked brilliant for the most part save the area between the legs where the weight paint was off). The library of animations is vast, sadly single animations are not too cheap. Still, if you need A LOT of characters rigged, and can afford their all access (around 1500$), might be a huge timesaver.

Cloth creation and animation: Marvellous Deisgner is a tool created just for creating and draping virtual clothing. Its hugely powerful, but also has a steep learning curve, as you work with cloth patterns instead of polygons and UVs now.

- Use a tool that will let you created textured and rigged characters: Mixamo has a new tool, Fuse, that allows you to create your character from standart parts, skin it with a texture, and will generate the mesh with rigs from it, ready to apply animations to it (Mixamo of course will hope you buy some of them from their online store )... they even added funtionality to let you import and use your own meshes, so you can create your own clothing and apply it to the character generated in the tool.

Of course, MakeHuman character can also be used in this fashion. I have no idea how good the rigs are, and they come out naked from the tool, but at least the mesh looks quite decent.

- Use a cartoonish style, or go without any organic characters at all to save time: the big time waster in 3D Modelling is creating highpoly sculpts, baking, photorealistic textures, and animations that do not let your characters fall down the uncanny vallye.

If you create your new game, plan your art style from the start in a way that lets you "go cheap" on the models you need to create. There is a reason why traditional animated movies worked with a very limited pallete of bright colors, usually with very hard shadow transitions, and leaving out most detials in the sketches of the characters.

Do the same for your character, and you can save baking and texturizing time like crazy. As an added bonus, if your character looks really cartoonish, you can make more obvious mistakes with your animations without them looking off.

Even better is to go the no-humans route. Just create a game with hard surface models, vehicles, technical structures, and so on. You don't need to do any rigging or animations (can be animated by code easely now), you save time with sculpting, and the textures can now also be much simpler.

Ultimatly, 3D Modelling is a HUGE topic that will easely consume way more than 50% of your time. If you are ready to invest something into tools, or the time to research free tools that might also let you be more productive, if you are willing to adjust your art style to your modelling capabilities and time constraints, you could get away with less and still have a nice looking 3D World at the end.

Just don't expect to get AAA looking 3D Models for free or done in an hour. If you are really time constrained, either get the budget to buy stock models, employ a freelance modeller, and if have no money and no time to spare, forget about 3D.

About your second question: The learning curve is quite steep. There are just so many different topics involved, that a beginenr can be completly overwhelmed quickly. Best advice is to start small with very simple shapes and textures, leave out any rigging or animations, and learn step by step.

It will take you years before you reach any kind of an efficient workflow, and you most probably will never reach the effciency and proficiency of some of the pros in the field.

Don't get me wrong, 3D Modelling can be extremly rewarding when you start to get the hang of it, and if you stick with you might get quite good after some years.

Just be aware that if you are looking for the fastest way to finished models, outsourcing and buying stock art is your best bet.

Edited September 23, 2014 by Gian-Reto

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Thanks Gian-Reto for the incredibly thorough and helpful response! My idea of what makes up a finished 3d model was vague, but you explained it very nicely. You also made my decision very easy -- that is, to not get into modeling right now. While I have great respect for 3d modellers, what I want to be doing is designing games and be able to implement them as efficiently as possible. We're doing 3d modeling with 3DS Max in school next fall, so I think I'll wait until then to give it a go. The list of tools for the different jobs will give me a head start :) Thanks again!

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Thanks Gian-Reto for the incredibly thorough and helpful response! My idea of what makes up a finished 3d model was vague, but you explained it very nicely. You also made my decision very easy -- that is, to not get into modeling right now. While I have great respect for 3d modellers, what I want to be doing is designing games and be able to implement them as efficiently as possible. We're doing 3d modeling with 3DS Max in school next fall, so I think I'll wait until then to give it a go. The list of tools for the different jobs will give me a head start Thanks again!

Well, see, if you are looking for a possibilty to start dabbling in 3D Modelling, just start with some simple projects.

You know, a barrel, a chair, a table. Make sure you understand the basics, hand paint some simple textures, leave away normal maps for now. You will have a nice looking scene in no time. It won't be AAA, but it will be all your work. And actually even simple 3D Objects can look good.

If you are looking for a general run-down of topics, I will try to list them for you:

Boxmodelling: basic polygon modelling. You create models by starting with a simple polygon object (cube, pyramid, whateva), and model an actual object out of it by extrusion, vertex translations, and so on. Good for Hardsurface models and simple Cartoon style models, needed as base for most sculpting tools.

Sculpting: This is the step where you take your base model, and add high frequency details to it. Think adding skin pores and wrinkels to a face, wood structure to a table, and so on. The toolset is usually geared towards organic sculpting, and its often used also to refine the basic shape defined in the boxmodelling step. Some tools might give you options to ommit the boxmodelling step and start with the sculpting tools (VoxModelling in 3D Coat, ZSpheres in ZBrush).

Retopology: This is the step where you take your sculpted highpoly model (which might consist of millions of polygons now), and create a lowpoly mesh (usually some 100s to 100'000s of polygons) for it, OR map your highpoly model back to your base model. The Workflow will depend a lot on the tool used, 3D Coat for example give you automatic options (altough they are more geared towards non-game applications). The process of mapping the highpoly to the lowpoly model and extracting a normal map out of it is called "baking"

UV Mapping: Can be part of the retopology process, still important enough to deserve a special mentioning. Here you unwrap your lowpoly model to a 2D Space, you create the "UV Coordinates" which will later be used by all other tools and engines to decide where to map the pixels in your 2D Texture unto your 3D Model. This sounds simple, but its an art unto itself. Too many "seams" (parts where the 3D shell is cut apart to fit unto 2D UV Space) and they become obvious and ugly looking, to little seams and your 3D models Texture will look distorted as textures get stretched and squashed to fit the 3D topology into 2D space.

Creating Textures: Nowadays there is a multitude of texture maps used. The usual ones used by many of the common legacy shaders are:

Diffuse (Color Texture, basically the colors used by the shader to render your model)

Normal (the bump map, used by the lighting engine to fake high frequency details not captured by your low poly mesh)

Gloss (only needed for shaders using a specular lighting model, this map is defining the strength of specular highlight at the given pixel

Depending on the shader an engine, more maps might be used. some of them are used just for creation of other maps (for example, the baked AO values often get put into the diffuse color map), or for special texturing tools (DDO uses a curvature map for defining where to put scratches on your objects textures for example).

Some time ago, Physically based shading became the big thing for next gen shaders. This lighting model uses some additional maps for the specular highlights, and also now cubemaps for environmental reflections seem to become standart were reflective shaders were not that common before.

There are many, many ways to create textures. Some artists prefer to paint them in PS in UV Space still (2D Space, basically the flat unwrapped model), while other like to use the many tools that support painting the 3D Model directly now. there are tools and ways to generate the textures for you as explained above.

LOD Creation: This is a step where you either redo the earlier steps to get lower resolutions versions of your model, or use a tool to reduce the polycount. There are many options for this nowadays, so you don't necessarily need to redo everything from scratch. Also, your game might not need LODs at all, its important for Openworld games with large viewdistances, but might not be that important to games with smaller performance footprints.

Rigging: Only needed for skinned meshes (meshes that should deform during animations, organic creatures). During this process the mesh gets a "skeleton" of bones assigned that can later on be used to deform the mesh during animation. All the mesh polygons are mapped to this bones by "weigh painting", which will tell the 3D Package which polygon should deform to what extend if a particular bone is moved. Also, some special helpers are added, for example for Inverse Kinematics (which helps for example planting a foot on a collider (the ground for example)

Animation: here, the rig created before is put into motion. There are multiple ways of animation, and frankly, I am no that expierienced with it yet. Suffice to say you can either do it "manually" by moving your rig in your 3D Package and defining animation keyframes and morph targets this way, or you can record an animation from a live actor by using Motion Capturing (which has come down in price significantly thanks to some low cost alternatives in the last few years).

Edited September 23, 2014 by Gian-Reto

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If you are looking for a general run-down of topics, I will try to list them for you:

Again, incredibly helpful! Not only for me but for any modeling noob. This is definitely worth a sticky! Maybe I'll download Blender after all and try out some simple things when I have some spare time

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NURBS Modelling: This is a special case of Boxmodelling and something tools like Blender or 3DS Max borrowed from CAD Programs. Here you basically work with curves and lines to define the rough shape of a model, and then use some functions to create a shell out of it. Another set of tools let you create a polygon mesh from this, which you then can use as base for boxmodelling or sculpting.

Hugely useful for hardsurface modelling, creating the aerodynamic outer appearance of a modern car is very hard to do without NUBS... another case is creating a Ships body.

All the full 3D Packages will give you some kind of NURBS tools, but there are specialized tools like MoI that make NURBS modelling easier.

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Great feedback and I agree with you 100%. I have been Modeling/Texttures/SoftwareDev and in VFX for 15+ years and was a creator of Mudbox you mentioned. Modeling is a deep field for sure. Now days there are a lot of tutorials on Youtube but Im sure for beginners its difficult to understand where to start.

Hatake don't forget there are sites to help you get free models or models you can add to your game. Check out indiedungeon.com as they are new and have some cool stuff.I hear they will have more free stuff soon as well.

Hatake Im curious what confused you most about the work involved with starting in 3d? Or you just did not know where to begin? The reason I ask is because Im putting together a bunch of free tutorials showing process from idea to complete game so was curious of your perspective.

D

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From-idea-to-complete-game tutorials are awesome, there are too few of those! :-)

From studying some of the other fields of game development, I've picked up as mentioned the notion that 3d modeling is a very complex subject and is time-consuming work. Other than watching a few short Blender tutorials (to get an idea of what 'these modellers' are actually doing! I really knew nothing at all about workflow), I've done nothing to improve my knowledge or skill in the subject.

Because of my preconceived notions and lack of knowledge in the subject, it seemed a bit daunting. I knew there was a lot to learn, but I didn't know what I needed to learn. So after reading Gian-Retos replies and doing some more reading, the subject borders are more defined -- I have a better overview of the subject. Being told by someone with experience that "this is the extent of the subject, these are the main concepts" is very helpful because it saves me hours of research, fumbling in the dark and doubting that what I'm currently learning/working on is useful.

Or you just did not know where to begin?

When I do get the time, I'm still not sure where to begin. After downloading Blender I'll probably spend some time googling beginner tutorials, picking out some that I like and then dive into it.

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When I do get the time, I'm still not sure where to begin. After downloading Blender I'll probably spend some time googling beginner tutorials, picking out some that I like and then dive into it.

Good idea. While its a vast topic and to create a realistic high poly mesh that can be rigged and animated can be a very long laborious process, the basic operations are as simple as they can be:

Create a simple geometrical object, and move around vertex points (the corners of the polygons) or polygons/faces (the whole polygon with all its vertices). With this knowlege alone you can start to create very simple shapes. Add in functions to split/cut/subdivide polygons, rotate/scale Polygons, and the ability to group multiple meshes, and you have all you need to create a lot of shapes. The only limit now is your imagination (And your patience / time )

I am pretty sure a good beginners tutorial will show you these commands and how to use them.

From there on its just expierience, and picking up new stuff from time to time, always tackling bigger and bigger projects, and soon you will be a pretty decent 3D Modeller.

Be aware that Blender has a very unintuitive and weird User Interface. Almost everything can be done with key shortcuts, not all of it is reflected in the drop down menus (some stuff is in the context menu, but its all quite hard to find).

There are many pages on the web devoted to listing the blender commands. Bookmark at least one good reference page for the blender interface, and maybe keep it open while you start with blender. You will need the reference very often.

Also be aware that the key shortcuts have changed quite a lot over the last few releases of Blender, so make sure you get a reference for the newest version (or whatever version you use).

Edited September 26, 2014 by Gian-Reto

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How I started was with 3ds max and its help files I first did the still life and from there just started doing more and more stuff copy other objects then start your own from scratch. I can put out some mesh objects in about 20 to 30 hours there not that good but its a hobby game.